Summer Road Trip Games … Bringing The Family Together (And Win A Sony VAIO Tap 20!)

As I’ve talked about before, I like technology best when it brings people together, and I love it when it helps me bring my family closer.

When we go on family vacations, often we take road trips, and in the car it it can seem like everyone’s plugged in to their own device!

But we’ve been trying a few new things:

We’ve now tried bringing the Sony VAIO Tap 20 All-In-One PC on our road trips, and it’s been a fun way to keep the kids busy — plus, we’ve been relying on a few of our favorite in-the-car games.

I’ll share some road trip ideas with and without the Sony VAIO Tap 20 — and tell you how you can enter to win your own Sony VAIO Tap 20below:

When everyone’s plugged into their own devices, it seems like we’re all “alone together,” (to steal a phrase from About a Boy).

And since family vacations and family road trips are about being together, we’re trying some new and some old ideas.

(Let’s keep it real: I still welcome some times when the car is quiet and everyone’s either watching the car DVD on headphones or on their own headphones!)

Some Tried and True Games

Yellow Car Bingo: The younger girls (much to the older kids’ chagrin) love to look for yellow cars — and when they spot one, they yell “bingo.” Over time, the rules have become very specific: the vehicle has to be able to travel at freeway speeds, and so forth. The passenger with the most “bingos” wins. Sometimes it’s dad.

State License Plates: You can find printables for it, but we just use pads of paper — and of course, the person who spots license plates from the most US states, Mexican states and Canadian provinces wins.

I Spy: Of course, the old classic “I Spy” is great — when we’re somewhere with scenery. (We have a ban on that game in the entire state of Nevada. Not enough variety.)

What are yours?

New Ideas

We have named ours “Scott.” Get it? Scott VAIO? It was my husband’s idea. He even calls it “Chachi” just to be extra clever.

I’ve had a few questions about why the Sony VAIO Tap 20 is called an “All-In-One” PC. It means a few things. First, it works great for movies & games (I love the Sony BRAVIA screen), work, web browsing, and more. And “All-In-One” means it has all of the computer pieces in one unit (except for the mouse and keyboard, of course).

Since it’s “all-in-one,” we bring it on road trips because it’s fun for two or more to play games, draw, or, with a mobile WiFi hotspot, even play some (low-bandwidth) online games together!

Here are some of the games:

You can see some from the Windows 8 start menu. And since the Sony VAIO Tap 20 has a great touchscreen, we can use it as a giant tablet PC in the car!

(see the pics at the beginning of this post for an example!)

I’ve moved some apps around, but you can see some of the games that ship with the Sony VAIO Tap 20, like:

TapTiles, a fun, 3-D touch matching game

The classic Minesweeper, updated for touch.

(Note that if you have an XBox Live account it will track your scores!)

A starter edition of PuzzleTouch, where you can choose from premade puzzles, or make your own,

like Ella’s soccer game picture the girls are trying to assemble in the collage at the start of the post:

And the girls also like to compete for high scores on this game:

Wordament, a Boggle-like game. (You can see them playing that in the collage too.)

Wow that Sony VAIO is sick!!! I actually have a website devoted to road trip games, located here at http://roadtripgames.net/ . Would you mind if I included it into my list? I’ll give you credit/recognition? Again, that thing looks epic. Hope you had a fun trip.
Scott

we take our small 7″ galaxy tab on trips with us but the screen is small and the kids argue over who gets to hold it so we always end up going with good old non tech games 🙂 I spy is their favorite and the whole family gets to play.

We just finished a trip back to Vancouver BC from Oregon and played a few of our favourites: punch buggy (a Volkswagen Beetle), guess what animal I am and a new one invented by by book loving daughter -Guess what fictional character I am (from books, movies, TV shows). It kept them busy for hours.

We actually let my youngest take clay, he uses a lap desk, keeps him content….the older two read and draw also. We always let them bring handheld electronics and DVD’s, but between movies they color and sculpt.

I sooooo need this- what an awesome device. My kids would love it & like I said before- I love that it’s so portable yet all the functions I need to really be productive once we arrive at our destination.

I’m totally laughing about I Spy in NV- yeah- not much to see. I can attest to that after living all over the state for the last 13 years before moving here. It’s like do you see brown or more brown? It gives a whole new meaning to “middle of nowhere” 🙂Gina recently posted…Ruffle Piñata Tutorial

Our favorite road trip game is spotting the letters of the alphabet in order, one by one. Our kids are three and five, so this is a great exercise! It works best if you’re traveling on freeways with lots of billboards.

Lovely idea for road trips! My family loves singing songs on the way, we make two teams and take turns. The first team sings a song for 2 minutes, then the last sound the song ends on, the other team has to sing a song with the same alphabet. The team who is able to sing the most songs, wins!

That is one nifty device! I think our little family needs one. Our oldest is neaing six years and she’s all about technology and our baby is closing in on a year so it would be a fantastic learning tool. Thanks for sharing this information on this cool computer. It seems we only hear of iPads these days!Amanda recently posted…Yard Sale Advice 101 with Pizazz!

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